Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/701

Rh long before the mammoth and the mastodon had yet dreamed of appearing upon the stage of existence, long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on Nature's rough draught of the still undeveloped and unspecialized lion, long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and colossal giraffes of late Tertiary times had even begun to run their race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, and turned upon itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and animals out of its own inner consciousness. The natural consequence was, that progress in Australia has been absurdly slow, and that the country as a whole has fallen most wofullywoefully [sic] behind the times in all matters pertaining to the existence of life upon its surface. Everybody knows that Australia as a whole is a very peculiar and original continent; its peculiarity, however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in the fact that it still remains at very nearly the same early point of development which Europe had attained a couple of million years ago or thereabout. "Advance, Australia," says the national motto; and, indeed, it is quite time nowadays that Australia should advance; for, so far, she has been left out of the running for some four mundane ages or so at a rough computation.

Example, says the wisdom of our ancestors, is better than precept; so perhaps, if I take a single example to start with, I shall make the principle I wish to illustrate a trifle clearer to the European comprehension. In Australia, when Cook or Van Diemen first visited it, there were no horses, cows, or sheep; no rabbits, weasels, or cats; no indigenous quadrupeds of any sort except the pouched mammals or marsupials, familiarly typified to every one of us by the mamma kangaroo in Regent's Park, who carries the baby kangaroos about with her, neatly deposited in the sac or pouch which Nature has provided for them instead of a cradle. To this rough generalization, to be sure, two special exceptions must needs be made; namely, the noble Australian black-fellow himself, and the dingo or wild dog, whose ancestors no doubt came to the country in the same ship with him, as the brown rat came to England with George I of blessed memory. But of these two solitary representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna "more anon"; for the present we may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial animals, with names as strange and clumsy as their forms.

Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family, viewed in the dry light of modern science? Well, they are simply one of